Friday, May 26, 2006

Another loss, well its very easy to criticize when things go wrong, and I'm good at it B-(Lets begin with batting order:Openers:We are not playing with regular openers, and Dravid's way of leading by example by filling in for an opener is somehow not doing any good to team.No doubt he is best player, most dependable player in both form of games but his position is ONE-DOWN, like I always advocate 'Opening' and 'One-Down' are the specialist position, and should not be fiddled around much.

Has anyone we ever seen Ponting opening the inning?? no, coz one-down guy regulates the inning, controls the flow of inning. He is the best man for them to do so.They rather prefer Clark or Katich to fill-in for an injured or out-form Hayden/Gilchrist, but never Ponting.

And in our case when Dravid opens, there is no one mentally strong enough to take-up the one-down slot. The policy of flexible middle-order is good, but having a floating one-down batsman is bad. I'm sure none in team knows who will go one down in next game. They have tried Pathan(in a low scoring game, another flaw in strategy),Raina,Yuvi,Dhoni,Rao,Kaif but no ever came close to batting throughout the inning and control the flow.

Another important position is ODIs is number 5, at number 5 there should be a guy who can play BIG shots guys like Andrew Symonds or Flintoff not like Kaifs or Raos who at most can score a double after wasting a dozen balls. Yuvraj is best suited for number 5 so that he can come start scoring from the first ball unlike Kaifs and Raos who take (only God knows how much) time to settle.

In current situation, without Sachin and badly out of form Sehwag, whole team depends on Dravid and Yuvraj, and with Dravid opening the inning, and a makeshift one-down batsman and Yuvi coming at number 4 makes the batting order looks very fragile in the event of Dravid or Yuvi getting out cheaply. As we all know, we do not have batting bench strength, so more or less we can only re-shuffle these guys here n there n Rao filling in for out-of-form Kaif or injured Yuvraj. It is only foolish to rely on Dhoni or Pathan each time. Top order batman should come forward take the responsibility of scoring.